Frivolity and Modernity: Parasols in the Long Nineteenth Century

Reviewed by: The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain 1860–1914 Elsie B. Michie (bio) The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain 1860–1914, by Brent Shannon; pp. xi + 252. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006, £31.95, £15.95 paper, $49.95, $24.95 paper. Brent Shannon's The Cut of His Coat: Men, Dress, and Consumer Culture in Britain 1860–1914 offers a profusion of verbal and visual information about men's fashion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: we see images of vests that look like crocodile skin and of suits worn over trousers to keep them from gathering dust while driving; we view the floor plans of Harrods and pictures of wardrobes with myriad compartments to keep men's garments from getting wrinkled; we learn that the proper costume for punting consists of "white flannel trousers without a belt or a cummerbund but pulled in with a small strap at the back. The trousers are turned up to show white cashmere or silk socks" (169). By providing these fascinating details, the results of lengthy archival work, Brent Shannon intends to alter our preconceptions about men and fashion in the Victorian era, to replace what is "merely an ideology" with "the actual sartorial practice of 'real-life' middle-class Englishmen" (26, 39). The first ideology that Shannon challenges is the theory, articulated by John Carl Flugel in 1930, that a "Great Masculine Renunciation" took place in the nineteenth century when, in reaction to the rise of industrialism and the emergence of the Protestant ethic, men gave up their interest in fashion and took to wearing the unimaginative and practical dark suit. Shannon attacks this preconception on two fronts. First he shows, in a move that might remind readers of Michel Foucault's arguments about sexuality and the [End Page 314] repressive hypothesis, that renouncing fashion necessarily involved extensive writing about renunciation. The act of renouncing did not mean a lack of concern about dress. It meant, in Shannon's words, that "'Renunciation' was, after all, just another fashion" (34). Second, he attacks the idea of male renunciation directly by showing, through conduct books, advertisements, department store plans, tailors' brochures, and excerpts from novels, that there was an extensive (and heretofore unexplored) nineteenth-century interest in men's dress. Providing this information is the heart of Shannon's critical intervention into our understanding of the history of fashion. Though The Cut of His Coat covers the period from 1860 to 1914, it is most detailed in discussing the 1890s and early 1900s. In chapter 3, the liveliest of the book, Shannon presents readers with his research into the periodical Fashion, which ran from 1898 to 1905 (including seventy-nine issues) and dealt with men's garments, fashionable behavior, and sartorial accoutrements. This periodical is a surprising late-nineteenth-century version of the men's fashion magazines that we assume, as Shannon points out in his epilogue, to be a modern phenomenon. While fashion historians have argued that such magazines emerged in the 1960s through vehicles like Playboy, Shannon demonstrates not just that the concern with men's fashion was already a nineteenth-century phenomenon but also that the Victorian approach to men's fashion was surprisingly open-minded. Reading Fashion in light of concerns with sexual inversion and effeminacy associated with Oscar Wilde, Shannon shows that, while the periodical takes pains to emphasize the "masculinity" of fashion by associating it with soldiers and athletes, it was also perfectly comfortable with paralleling men's obsession with fashion to women's. In its second half, The Cut of His Coat adds to its analysis of fashion and gender a consideration of the relation between men's fashion and class. Here again Shannon's aim is to challenge a canonized reading of nineteenth-century fashion and economics, the idea of "emulative spending," articulated by Thorstein Veblen in 1899 and picked up by Georg Simmel in his work on fashion in the early twentieth century. Beginning with a discussion of the masher and the dandy and then tracing the emergence of the three-piece suit that has become the uniform of...

Notes on Contributors

The exhibits on display in natural science museums today often have parallels within the historical collections carefully preserved behind the scenes. One such is the collection of William Buckland (1784-1856) in Oxford University's Museum of Natural History, amassed during the first half of the nineteenth century. As the first to hold the post of Reader (Professor) of Geology at Oxford, Buckland worked hard to develop his geological knowledge and quickly established a central place for himself in the Geological Society through his bold new theories and fieldwork. Thanks to his own collecting and numerous exchanges and gifts from individuals in his networks, he built up a diverse collection for use in his research and teaching. Through five case studies in this article I consider how Buckland's, and by extension other such collections, could be used again in teaching today, particularly with university students. This would contribute to the reinforcement of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects urged by the UK government, as well as aligning with the interest in material culture current in academia (Department fo Education 2015). Historical collections abound with objects that embody multidisciplinary narratives, and as such they can play an important role in deepening students' interest in science. I also discuss additional ways that some educators are using objects in undergraduate teaching today. These are designed to transcend disciplinary approaches and promote a range of soft skills, such as confidence, inclusivity, imagination and empathy. Considered afresh, historical science collections could have increased value for museum curators and educators of all kinds.

The Natural History Museum Vienna is one of the most important museums of natural history in the world. Its collections date back to the year 1750, when the Emperor Franz Stephan of Lorraine (Franz I. Stephan) purchased (from Italy) what was then the largest and most famous collection of natural history specimens. The meteorite collection of the Natural History Museum in Vienna, Austria, has the longest history of all comparable collections in the world. In the second half of the eighteenth century, soon after the foundation of the Imperial Natural History Cabinet in 1750, the Viennese curators began to collect meteorites. Although the first curators neither believed in the extraterrestrial origin nor accepted—in several cases—the written and witnessed histories of these allegedly “heavenly” stone and iron masses, they preserved them in the Natural History collection. Among the first acquisitions were the historical important meteorites Hraschina (Agram), Tabor, Krasnojarsk (Pallas iron), and Eichstädt. These and other well-documented specimens from the Vienna collection were, for example, used by E.F.F. Chladni for his seminal treatises of 1794 and 1819, respectively. The central figure in the early history of the collection is Carl von Schreibers (1775–1852). After the fall of the Stannern meteorite in 1808, he availed himself of every opportunity to acquire meteorite specimens. His continued interest in meteorites laid the foundation for the Vienna collection to be of the historical and scientific importance it is today. Due to the efforts of Schreibers, who also is regarded as founder of meteoritic science in Vienna, and his successors, the Vienna collection became the largest and most extensive in the course of the nineteenth century. In terms of the geological and paleontological collections, early expeditions and collecting campaigns were mainly targeting exotic animals and plants, while paleontological objects were welcome but subordinate. It was only in the early nineteenth century that the paleontological collections were—literally and figuratively speaking—systematically enlarged. Internationalization and diversification became the focus of the collection strategy. The paleontology collections at the Vienna museum also became important in the Darwinian view of evolution.

Cosmopolitanizing Colonial Memories in Germany

“Breaking juju,” breaking trade: Museums and the culture of iconoclasm in southern Nigeria

Exotic animals have long been the ultimate collectibles. Exotic animals, alive and active, have been more fascinating and exciting than natural history (museum) specimens, plants, or cultural artifacts — in part, because animals are less common, more difficult to acquire, and more expensive to maintain. And then, there is the fascination, both emotional and scientific. Since ancient times the passion for possessing wild animals from distant lands has overcome the great difficulties and expense of capturing, transporting, and maintaining them. To paraphrase a proverbial saying, if there were no zoo, someone would invent one. And many have done so over the past 5,000 years, in various ways. Cultural institutions, like the cultures that foster them, evolve over time. This evolution is certainly true for zoos and aquariums, which have evolved in parallel with the diversity of cultures that have nurtured them. Keeping wild animals is as old as the first attempts at domestication, which began about 10,000 B . C .; however, “collections” of wild animals were not assembled until the earliest urbanized civilizations began about 3000 B . C . These early collections, within the context of their times, were in effect the earliest zoos, even though they were not then referred to as zoos. Zoo-related terminology, as it now exists, did not come into use until the modern zoo concept developed during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a period when animal collections significantly changed and became the cultural institutions that are now familiar to us. Because an etymology for zoos and aquariums analogous to etymologies for natural history museums and botanical gardens 1,2 has not been developed, a preliminary etymology for zoos and aquariums is provided at the end of this chapter, following the discussion of the historical context within which these terms emerged. Past cultures, ancient through early modern, viewed nature as an integrated whole even while attempting to categorize its many parts. Ancient collections began as more than just gatherings of these parts; animals were kept within a natural setting. Early trade in exotic products also included both animals and plants, and rarely seen species were coveted acquisitions for those who could afford such extravagances. Collecting plants was useful and important because plants had food and medicinal values, while some were popular for their ornamental uses. Plant collections were widespread because plants were easy to transport (as seeds, bulbs, or cuttings) and were economical to maintain and display. Live animals, on the other hand, were more difficult and expensive to transport, maintain, and exhibit, and these difficulties made animals 2100_frame_C01 Page 1 Wednesday, March 21, 2001 8:00 AM

In their First Word essay, “Listening as a Radical Act,” Erica de Greef, Shayna Goncalves, and Angela Jansen (2021) argue for the importance of listening as a means to overcome our legacies of colonization. Without listening, it is too easy to assume that “fashion” is inherently capitalist and modern, created by genius designers (artists) in Western fashion capitals (Paris, London, New York) and that everything else is just a pale imitation. The way I have stated this might seem like an exaggeration—surely it can't be that bad in fashion studies—but as the authors have pointed out from their own diverse perspectives, it really is that bad. Too many people have experienced the study and curation of fashion as a devaluing gauntlet.The first book I can think of that explicitly questioned the colonial underpinnings of fashion studies, Re-Orienting Fashion (2003), was published less than two decades ago. In 2016, the book's primary coeditor and member of the Research Collective for Decoloniality & Fashion (RCDF), Sandra Niessen, reappraised the state of the discipline:As a historian of fashion, dress, and the body with expertise on African dress and fashion (Akou 2011), contemporary Islamic fashion, and working-class histories of dress in the United States, I agree with Niessen: We have made some progress, but fashion studies as a discipline has hardly been transformed. This is disheartening, especially when I think about the cultural importance and tremendous creativity of sartorial expression in many African and African diaspora cultures. As a graduate student, I never had to justify the value of studying African fashion because my advisor was Joanne Eicher (2022). Most beginning scholars are not that lucky.Listening is critical for decolonizing fashion studies, but it is not enough. Like art history, the study of fashion is about material culture; it cannot be fully understood through images alone. Fashion studies is also about people and places that support fashion practices— photographers, bloggers, designers, makers, fashion magazines, models, retail stores, etc…. Scholars can (and do) study contemporary practices, but what about the histories behind them? How do we know that African fashion changes? What is happening now that is different from ten or fifty years ago? As explored in Creating African Fashion Histories: Politics, Museums, and Sartorial Practices (McGregor, Akou, and Stylianou 2022), one of the reasons that fashion studies is so mired in Eurocentrism is because fashion collections in museums so rarely include examples of fashion from Africa or from other non-Western cultures. Instead, traces are scattered in other kinds of collections—categorized as art, trade goods, and “ethnographic” artifacts. For example, in my own study on the history of Somali dress, I did not find a single artifact in a fashion collection; everything was held by museums of art and natural history. Similarly, collections of African art in museums often include elements of dress such as textiles, jewelry, and masks, but rarely do curators attempt to include contemporary fashion or to represent individual fashion designers in their permanent collections.Transforming museums—whether by pulling these traces of fashion histories back together or by making fashion collections more inclusive—will not be easy. It is not easy for museums in Europe and North America to build trust among potential donors in Africa and the African diaspora, especially when so few curators are people of color. It is not easy for museums (anywhere) to justify their budgets when governments and nonprofit organizations have so many other pressing needs to address. Wealthy funders can have interests that are sharply different from scholars and museum visitors; sometimes they resist the most basic reforms.Just like African scholars and makers of fashion deserve to be heard, African fashion deserves to be seen in museums. True, systemic transformation of fashion studies and fashion collections will be a tremendous challenge. Listening is essential, but change is going to be limited until we change how we curate and access collections.

For the first time, a study has appeared that covers the history of art museums in the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the nineteenth century, which includes not only Vienna but also Kraków, Prague, Zagreb and Budapest. In addition to studying their role as public institutions and their involvement in the complex cultural politics of the Habsburg Empire, the three authors of the present volume aim to explore the place of these institutions in the wider history of European museums and collecting. Within the ‘long nineteenth century’, they focus on the period from 1867, when Austria-Hungary formally came into existence as a constitutional monarchy, and 1918, when it collapsed as a consequence of the First World War. The lead author is Matthew Rampley, professor of art history at Masaryk University (Brno). He provides the introduction, entitled ‘Museums and cultural politics in the Habsburg world’, and the first chapter, ‘The museological landscape of Austria-Hungary’, both of which are nourished by, and also provide a framework for, the five following chapters. Two of the five are contributed by Nóra Veszprémi, research fellow at Masaryk University. Her contributions, ‘The rise of the museum professions’ and ‘Principles and practices of display’, are preceded by another from Rampley, ‘Museums and their architecture’, and one by Markian Prokopovych, assistant professor of history at Durham University, entitled ‘Art, municipal programs, and urban agendas’. Prokopovych also wrote the final chapter, ‘Museums and their publics’. An epilogue by Rampley, ‘Modernity and regime’s end’, offers a bridge to his and Veszprémi’s next (currently ongoing) project, entitled Continuity/Rupture: Art and Architecture in Central Europe, 1918–1939, also based at Masaryk University. The three authors previously published Liberalism, Nationalism and Design Reform in the Habsburg Empire: Museums of design, industry and the applied arts (Routledge, 2020).

Taxonomic relationships in genus Berylmys (B. bowersi, B. mackenziei, B. manipulus, B. berdmorei) have traditionally been ambiguous and made difficult by their geographically disjunct and scattered populations. Several specimens held in museum collections are still of unknown or disputed species assignations. Nor have cranial characters in this genus been tested for significance in variance or for usefulness in separating species. Appropriate species identifications are important for any museum-based study of phylogeny, phylogeography, population biology, functional morphology, or conservation. This study tested diagnostic characters and species assignments on one-hundred two specimens of Berylmys housed in American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), Smithsonian Museum of Natural History (NMNH), and Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH) collections. Discriminant function (DFA), principal components (PCA), and linear regression were used to analyze sixteen morphometric measurements. DFA correctly ...

Notes on Contributors

This study analyzed the expressive phenomenon of a blurred boundary in fashion jewelry focused on the relationship between fashion jewelry and costume or fashion jewelry and body. The method of this study was to analyze recent documentaries about jewelry theories in regards to 607 cases of fashion jewelry design in fashion books, fashion magazines, fashion internet sites from 2000 to 2014. The results were: First, phenomenon of blurred boundary between fashion jewelry and costume was expressed in a see-through wear form made of luxury material (gold and diamond) or paste material, a similar form (like fashion accessories made of crystal, bids, and gold chain), an integration of fashion accessories and jewelry, and an attached jewelry on fashion accessories. It reflected a rearrangement of conventional relationships, a blurred relation of function and meaning, dissolution of jewelry form stereotypes, jewelry styling, a harmony of function and decoration, and an alteration to the central role of a fashion image. Second, the phenomenon of a blurred boundary between fashion jewelry and body was expressed in a body organ wrapping, body surface adhesion and sculptural jewelry based on body pose. It reflected a separation from conventional space of jewelry expression, a realization of mystery and fantastic, an expression of new body surface and a blurred boundaries of fashion jewelry and body art. Aesthetic characteristics were analyzed into metaphor and integration by separation from the conventional relationship of fashion jewelry and costume or fashion jewelry and body.

Reliving past glories

Jeans and their Fashionable Meanings: Revisiting Beverly Gordon's Cultural Conceptual Framework

The Missing Women of Sande: A Necessary Exercise in Museum Decolonization